


The Professor and the Physician: 1969

by Vigs



Series: The Doctor and the Dreamers [4]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-29
Updated: 2016-07-10
Packaged: 2018-05-10 07:15:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 12,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5576173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vigs/pseuds/Vigs
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor and Martha never discussed what happened while they were stuck in 1913...until they were grounded once again, this time in 1969. Ten/Martha with references to Ten/Rose.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Arrival

**Author's Note:**

> This is a direct sequel to "The Professor and the Physician: 1913." Unlike this story, that story contains some non-con elements. If you would prefer not to read it, all you really need to know is that the Doctor's human alter ego John Smith pressured Martha into entering into a sexual relationship with him, but she managed to turn the relationship into something more equitable, and they became pretty emotionally intimate before he had to turn back into the Doctor.

The Doctor didn’t frequently time travel without a capsule, but he’d done it often enough to instantly recognize the nauseating sensation of temporospatial disorientation. It also tended to come with some short-term memory loss, so he wasn’t entirely sure _why_ he’d time traveled with no protection, but he’d be willing to bet it wasn’t voluntary.

His surroundings were Earthlike, as far as he could tell. London-like, in fact. No one was actively threatening him or, apparently, paying any attention to him at all; the alley he sat in was nearly deserted. So whoever or whatever had transported him wasn’t on this end.

There was an audible pop of displaced air, and suddenly Martha collapsed to a seat beside him.

“Martha!” he said. “Good, we haven’t been separated, at least. Don’t try to get up, we’ve just been temporally displaced without any sort of protection. Does quite a number on the brain.”

“Doctor?” Martha looked at him woozily, then looked down and ground the heels of her hands into her eyes. “What happened?”

“Still trying to piece that together myself, but I think...of course!” He sat up straighter and winced when it made his head throb. “The statues! Remember, I’d picked up that strange temporal reading, and we were investigating that house, and there were those statues...I knew they looked familiar! Oh, I am so thick! Weeping Angels!”

“Okay, great, fine. Where are we?”

“If I had to venture a guess,” he said, rummaging in his coat pocket for a folder he’d stashed there some months previously, “I’d say London, 1969.”

“Pretty specific guess.”

“I have insider information.” He regarded the envelope cautiously. He’d never opened it...which in retrospect was probably what had let him be caught unawares by the angels in the first place. Well, it had prevented a paradox, so really it was all for the best. “I’m afraid we may be here for a while.”

“What? Why’s that?”

“Well, we’re in 1969, but the TARDIS is still in 2007. Not that we have to wait 38 years! We should be able to cut that down considerably. A few months at the most, I should hope.”

“Great,” Martha said, slumping back against the dirty brick wall behind her. “It’s only been, what, a month since the last time we were stuck in the past? Or I was, rather.”

The Doctor shifted uncomfortably. Neither of them usually brought their time in 1913 up, him because he was too much of a coward, Martha (he assumed) out of either sympathy or misplaced guilt.

“Well, this won’t be like that,” he said. “And 1969, that’s not such a bad year, is it? Not when you know there isn’t going to be a nuclear war. Well, unless we _really_ muck something up, but as long as we keep a low profile and don’t go anywhere near America or Russia, everything should be fine.”

“Very reassuring, thanks.”

“The problem is, I know there’s information we’ll need in here, but I don’t want to get too much foreknowledge. Ontological paradoxes give me the worst headaches.”

“Figuring out how to avoid them, you mean?” Martha asked.

“No, I mean when they happen it makes ripples in my timeline that manifest as a headache. Besides, it’s terribly boring, knowing what’s going to happen ahead of time, whether that information spontaneously created itself within a closed time loop or not.”

“Boredom and a headache sounds a lot better than being stuck in 1969,” Martha said.

“Good! You read it, then.” He passed the envelope to her. “Later, though. First we ought to...hm. We’re going to need somewhere to stay, which I suppose means money, but it’s too early for me to go to UNIT for it...we’ll have to find a cash point.”

“Did they have those in 1969? I mean, _do_ they have those?” Martha asked.

“Yep! Invented in 1967, if I’m right, which I usually am. Good thing to keep track of. You lot are always so fussy about money--has to be for the right country and have the right little pictures on it and all.”

“Yes, we’re very unreasonable about it,” Martha said in a tone the Doctor suspected may have been sarcastic. “They even have to be from around the right date.”

“Close as possible without going over, right. So picky.” He shook his head in mock-disapproval. “Ah, there’s one!”

The machine was lower-tech than the 21st century ones he was used to, which actually made it more difficult to fool, but eventually he managed to get a decent stack of tenners out of it. He hoped two hundred pounds would be enough to rent a room or something by the time Martha needed to sleep. She read through the papers in the folder while he was working.

“Apparently I’m going to have to get a job in a shop,” she told him when he rejoined her. “Or at least, I have to say that I did.”

“Weeeell, I can’t keep sonicing cash points indefinitely without anyone noticing, and there’s probably something that’ll take up my time, so…”

“Yeah, you need to come up with a way for us to locate other temporally displaced people.”

“Oh! Yes, I can do that, no problem! Well, I say no problem, it’ll probably be rather difficult in this time period, but I should be able to make it work. How long do we have, does it say?”

“Doesn’t seem to, no.” Martha flipped through the pages. “Well, better than having to be a maid again. Speaking of which, what should we say when we go to rent a room? Can’t exactly pass as siblings.”

“Cousins, then? No, I suppose that would probably raise more questions than it would answer. I don’t know, business partners? Who aren’t very good at business, I suppose, since we don’t have much money…”

“Well, you don’t need to sleep, so we really only need one bed, so it’d probably be simplest to say we’re married,” Martha said, looking at her shoes.

“Works for me. Ah, I think I’ve even still got…” He dug around in his pocket for a moment, then triumphantly produced two golden rings. “Aha! Biodampers! Not a bad idea for me to wear one anyway, in case anyone’s scanning for non-humans. Here.”

He passed a ring to Martha, and they each slipped one on.

“There we are. Mr. and Mrs. Jones, nice and ordinary. Hm, I usually use J first names, but that’d be a bit odd with Jones, wouldn’t it? Of course, I knew a Jo Jones once, but that wasn’t her name until after she got married, so it wasn’t as though her parents just loved that syllable.” He thought for a moment. “I’ll switch the S and the J! Sam Jones, that’s me.”

“Glad that’s settled,” Martha said. “Can we try to find a place to stay now?”

“Yep! Allons-y, Mrs. Jones!” He offered her his arm, and she laughed and took it.


	2. Wester Drumlins

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Martha and the Doctor find a place to stay.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter includes some references to the third Doctor's run, although you won't be missing much if you haven't seen it.

“No. Way.” Martha stood in front of the gate with her arms crossed, steadfastly refusing to move. The gate was in much better shape than it had been in 2007, unsurprisingly, but it still showed signs of chipped paint, and there were vines growing against the base.

“Come on, Martha! This has to be the way it was supposed to happen. The house that we got sent back from just _happens_ to be advertising an inexpensive room to rent? Didn’t you say there was a message for Sally Sparrow at the house? This must be how we leave it.”

“Last time we went in this house, we got sent forty years into the past. I am _not_ getting stuck in 1929.”

“Thirty-eight years!” the Doctor protested. “And that’s not very likely to happen. The odds of us getting sent back exactly the same amount of time are pretty slim. We could get sent to any point in the past.”

“Nope. Not doing it.”

“Come on, Martha, the angels probably aren’t even here yet. If they are, we leave, no problem.”

“Fine,” Martha sighed. “I suppose it’ll make it easier to figure out a way to paint a message on the wall if we’re living here.”

“That’s the spirit!”

Martha stepped aside and let the Doctor go in first, which he supposed was fair.

“If we do see an angel,” he said, “Keep looking at it. As long as you’re watching it, it can’t attack you.”

“Yeah, I got that out of the transcript,” she said. “‘Don’t even blink.’”

“There’s a _transcript_? Glad I didn’t read it, I’m terrible working off a script.”

At that point they reached the front door, and the Doctor rang the bell. Like the gate, the house was in better shape than it had been in 2007, but the walls were dingy and the windows were almost too grimy to see through. It seemed to him that it took an unreasonable amount of time for someone to come and answer, and he was impatiently bouncing from foot to foot by the time the door opened.

The woman who answered was quite short and held a cane, but stood with a straight back and managed to look at the two of them over the tops of her tortoiseshell glasses. Her slate-grey hair was pulled back into a neat bun, and she wore a crisp white apron over a navy blue dress.

“Can I help you?” she asked in frostily perfect BBC English.

“Yes, hello! I’m J--Sam Jones, and this is my wife Martha. We’re here to ask about the room.” He beamed at her as charmingly as possible, while Martha shifted nervously beside him.

“Oh, yes.” Her voice became slightly more friendly. “I’m Mrs. Peterson. The room is still available, although it may be a bit small for the two of you. Please, come in.”

They entered the house behind her. On the inside, the floors and furniture were immaculately clean, but the paint on the walls was chipped and faded, and the light fixtures and the corners of the ceilings were filled with cobwebs. Some of the lightbulbs were burned out, which combined with the dirty windows created an overall atmosphere of gloom.

The Doctor sniffed. “Do I smell something cooking?” he asked brightly. “Smells delicious.”

“Yes, I’m making a roast for supper,” she said. “There wasn’t enough space to mention it in the advertisement, but meals are included in the rent.”

“That’s a really good deal,” Martha said. “Most of the rooms were much more expensive and didn’t include meals.”

“Yes, well, I’ll not have anyone else messing about in my kitchen,” Mrs. Peterson sniffed. “Which is through here, by the way. And here’s the dining room, and the sitting room.”

The kitchen was the cleanest and best-lit room in the house, and far too much food for one person was roasting in the oven.

“So aside from the meals being included, what else are the terms of the rental?” Martha asked.

“Well,” Mrs. Peterson said reluctantly, “I was hoping that in exchange for the lower rent, you’d be able to help me around the house a bit. There are one or two things that I can’t take care of on my own any longer, and ever since my daughter and her husband moved to Manchester, they simply aren’t getting done.”

“I think we could work something out,” the Doctor said. “I’m pretty handy with a screwdriver.”

“It’s more a matter of cleaning the parts of the house that I can’t reach,” Mrs. Peterson admitted.

“Well, I’m sure I could figure that out too.” He wondered how difficult it would be to work out the resonant frequency of cobwebs. It wasn’t something he’d tried before, and it seemed like it might be an interesting challenge. Spiderweb itself was mostly homogenous, but if you took into account the effects of time and accumulated dust...

“Your room would be just at the top of these stairs,” Mrs. Peterson said, beginning to slowly ascend. “When were you hoping to move in?”

“Actually, tonight would be ideal,” the Doctor said.

“Ah, staying with relatives?” Mrs. Peterson asked. “I understand. Here’s your room. Mine is at the far end of the hallway.”

Their room was no dirtier than the rest of the house, but no cleaner either. It wasn’t particularly large, but there was a bed, a desk, and a dresser. Oh no, they were going to need to buy more clothes, weren’t they? He didn’t have so much as a spare shirt, and Martha was certainly going to want to change within a day or two, he was sure.

“I need to tend to the roast,” Mrs. Peterson said, “So take a moment to talk it over, and then let me know what you decide.”

She slowly walked away, resting on her cane in a way that allowed her to keep her back straight.

“What do you think?” the Doctor asked Martha.

“I like Mrs. Peterson,” Martha said. “And the price seems good for rent and food. Or at least, I think it does. All the prices seem ridiculously low to me.”

“There don’t seem to be any angels about, and we do have enough money to make the first payment,” the Doctor said. “If you get a job, I can help her with the cleaning and work on the temporal detector. Doesn’t seem like a bad arrangement.”

“As long as I don’t have to do any of the cleaning,” Martha said firmly. “Never again.”

“Of course,” the Doctor said. “Wouldn’t dream of asking.”

“Let’s take it, then,” Martha said. “I don’t think we’re going to be able to find somewhere else to stay by tonight, anyway. And it seems like a good way for you to paint on the wall and then paper over it, if you’re helping her around the house.”

“Molto bene. Let’s go get some supper.”

The first month’s rent changed hands without difficulty, the roast was delicious, and Mrs. Peterson listened politely, if somewhat skeptically, as the Doctor spun a tale of being an aspiring inventor trying to get his big break. She directed some sympathetic looks toward Martha; presumably the Doctor wasn’t acting the role of a good husband particularly well.

After dinner, the Doctor cleared the table, but Mrs. Peterson shooed him away and insisted on doing the dishes herself.

“Let’s pick our luggage up tomorrow,” Martha said. “It’s too late tonight.”

“Pick up...oh! Yes, that’s a good idea,” the Doctor said. “Good night, Mrs. Peterson.”

The two of them went up to their new bedroom. The Doctor had a feeling that he would get tired of the closeness of its four walls very quickly, but he would do his level best to appreciate their novelty while it lasted.

“I suppose we’ll need to buy luggage tomorrow,” he said to Martha, draping himself over the desk chair and turning it so she could get ready for bed without him looking on. It was the sort of automatic consideration that became reflexive after you’d shared enough prison cells, and he could identify the sounds of her removing her bra and trousers and getting settled in bed without even trying.

Not that he would try. That would be inappropriate.

“Figured we’d have to make up some sort of story to explain not having any otherwise,” she said as she changed. “This seems easier. And we’ll have to buy clothes anyway, might as well have something to put them in.”

“Sure,” he said. “Mm...can’t remember the last time I went clothes shopping. Even when I was stuck on Earth, I had the TARDIS’s wardrobe.”

“How were you stuck on Earth if you had the TARDIS?” Martha asked, and he gave her a few of the lighter anecdotes from his time working for UNIT.

“It’s too bad we’re too early for me to introduce you to Liz Shaw,” he said. “You would’ve loved her. And Jo, of course. Everybody loved Jo.”

“Even you?” Martha asked sleepily.

He tried to think of an answer that wouldn’t be an outright lie, but “yes” and “no” both felt as if they were out of the question.

“Well,” he said slowly, “If I were human, I would probably say so…”

A soft snore told him that he wouldn’t need to explain any further, and he breathed a sigh of relief.


	3. Veritas

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A long-due conversation.

Martha managed to find a job (in a shop, as predicted) in relatively short order via creative use of the psychic paper as an oddly-shaped resume. She spent her days selling cheap furniture; the Doctor spent his scouring London for the parts he would need to build a temporal displacement detector, then worked on cleaning the house after Martha and Mrs. Peterson went to sleep. So far their landlady hadn’t questioned his nocturnal housekeeping. The three of them only interacted at supper, after which he and Martha spent about an hour together before she went to sleep and he got to work cleaning. It wasn’t particularly enjoyable, but it was sort of novel since the TARDIS was largely self-tidying, and it kept him busy.

That comfortable, though somewhat claustrophobic, pattern got them through two weeks. The Doctor only needed a couple more parts before he could start assembling the detector, and he’d cleaned up the worst of the mess around the house, to the point that redoing the wallpaper was probably the next step. Martha had convinced him to actually look at the picture of the message he was supposed to leave instead of just writing random things and hoping it would work out, which he had mostly-jokingly insisted was necessary for paradox prevention.

Judging from the message he was supposed to write (“Duck! Duck now!”) this Sally Sparrow was going to be/had been in a rather difficult situation. He really hoped the timeline wouldn’t shift in such a way that they actually would have to wait linearly for the TARDIS to get back. Martha might just kill him until he stopped regenerating.

When she’d been working for about a week and a half, Martha announced with relief that she had the next day off.

“Oh, brilliant,” the Doctor said as they climbed the stairs to their bedroom. “What’re you going to do?”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do tomorrow, but tonight, we’re both getting properly pissed,” she informed him.

“Oh?” he said. “Why’s that, then?”

“Because I want to, and drinking alone is just sad, and it’s your fault that none of my friends are born yet, so you’re drinking with me.” There were two large paper bags on the floor of their bedroom, and she handed him one.

“Fair enough, but alcohol doesn’t actually...oh.” He reached into the bag and held up its contents. “Ginger beer.”

“You can’t have thought I’d forget about that,” Martha said.

He had actually sort of forgotten; it wasn’t information that he generally gave out. But after he had nearly died of...what would you call it, acute stellar possession?...and she’d had to freeze him, Martha had made him go over the major differences between Time Lord and human biology, at least enough for first aid, and he’d felt badly enough about the whole thing to answer her questions. That had included differences in reactions to common substances...and ginger was a fairly common substance.

“Blimey, I haven’t actually gotten drunk since…” he trailed off, realizing that it had been before the war. “In a long time.”

“Then you’re due.” She pulled a bottle of white wine out of her own bag. “Oh, we should’ve nicked some glasses while we were downstairs.”

“Nah,” the Doctor said, wrinkling his nose. “If we’re going to get drunk on a Tuesday night in our own room, let’s do it proper and drink straight from the bottle.”

“I like the way you think, Mr. Jones,” Martha said, grinning. “Screwdrive the cork off mine, would you?”

“It would be my pleasure, Mrs. Jones,” he said, and did so, then opened his own. “Cheers.”

They clinked their bottles together and each took a swig.

For a while, it was just like any other evening, there or on the TARDIS. Martha sat on the bed, the Doctor sat in the desk chair, and they traded stories and reminisced about their adventures together. After a while, the Doctor got up to better act out a particularly riveting anecdote, which ended with him falling dramatically onto the bed. Martha had collapsed in laughter, so they were lying next to each other at a 90-degree angle to how one was intended to lie in a bed, with their legs dangling over the side.

Her laughter faded, and she looked at him with a strange intensity.

“What is it?” he asked.

“I never had a chance to laugh like that with John,” she said. “Never got pissed with him either.”

“I’m sorry,” the Doctor said.

“Do you remember all of it? Being him?”

“Yes, but the memories are...strange. Humans don’t have as many senses as Time Lords, for one thing, so the memories feel very different from the rest of my memories. And then there were all the things he remembered that didn’t actually happen. It’s more like remembering a movie or a book that something I actually lived.”

“Oh.” Martha sat up and took another long drink of wine. She’d already had quite a lot. He’d had quite a lot of ginger beer, too.

“You look upset.”

“I told him turning back into you wouldn’t really be dying,” she said. “But I sort of convinced him to kill himself, didn’t I?”

“When you wake up from a dream, does the person you were in the dream die?” the Doctor asked.

“It’s not the same.”

“I suppose not. I’ve never really had a dream.”

“John had dreams.”

He didn’t quite know what to say to that, so he drank some more of the ginger beer.

“You know, there’s one thing I always wondered,” Martha said. “Why didn’t he put his clothes back on before he opened the watch? Can you remember?”

“Ah...yes,” the Doctor said, but didn’t elaborate.

“Why, then?”

“Well, partly he just wanted to get it over with, not drag it out. Wanted the last thing he did to be...you know. But, um, he’d also decided that if I was really him, or if he was really me, either way, then I must also, well, have the same sort of feelings for you that he did, and he thought that if I saw you, um, you know, the way that you were at the moment…” He was a Time Lord and he spoke every known language and a few unknown ones; why was he currently incapable of saying the word ‘naked’? “...that would make me, er, admit it, I suppose. Act on it.”

“That was a rubbish plan,” Martha said.

“Well. Yes. He was under a lot of stress at the time, you know. And he didn’t want to lose you.”

“He was an arse,” Martha said. “Fair for his day and all, but he was a racist, sexist arse.”

“Yes,” the Doctor said. “I’m...I’m sorry about that. I didn’t realize the TARDIS would--”

“But he listened when I needed him to. He cared about me.”

“I care about you.”

Martha snorted.

“What? I do, you must know I do,” the Doctor said indignantly.

“You care about everybody,” she said. “John cared about _me_.”

The Doctor kissed her.

There were a lot of reasons why he did it, although they didn’t actually add up to it being a good idea. For one thing, they’d been talking about John, and that had brought up the strange, dreamlike memories of all the times John and Martha had kissed. Mostly, he just wanted to show her exactly how he felt; he couldn’t let her keep thinking she wasn’t important to him, and the best way to show her how he felt was through telepathic contact.

Which didn’t _have_ to be in the form of a kiss, but, well...it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Martha wasn’t very telepathically sensitive, so he had to essentially _shove_ his feelings at her, pouring them into her in a wave.

_You saved me, Martha Jones, from death and from myself and from loneliness, and you are brilliant and clever and brave and so very beautiful, inside and out, and it scares me to death._

He hadn’t meant to send her quite that much, and he abruptly pulled away and stood up.

“I’ve got an idea,” he said, “Let’s take a walk! I’ll introduce you to my friend Diane. Oh, but we should bring some money, she’s at work and it would be rude to waste her time without paying. How much were the drinks? Not to criticize, of course, you’re the one who earned it. Anyway it’s still all a bit mystifying to me, the whole money thing; it’s not as though it has any intrinsic--”

“Doctor,” she cut him off. “Why are you afraid?”

“Did you know,” he said, striving to stick to the light tone he’d been using, “That you can lose everything more than once? I didn’t realize that you could. But I lost everything once, and I grieved, and I moved on with my life with a hole through my hearts, and then I found a new reason to live, a new everything. And then I lost her too, and I grieved--I’m still grieving for both times, really--but I’m starting to move on with my life with another hole through my hearts. And I will always lose every human I care about.”

“But you’ve cared before,” Martha said, trying to understand. “I know you cared about the people you’ve mentioned--Ace, and Jamie, and Jo Grant, and all--and I don’t know what happened to them, but--”

“But they weren’t everything,” he said harshly. “I had my planet. I had my father, and my daughter, and my granddaughter, my student and my teacher and my master, and I knew I’d never outlive any of them. Not even my father, not when he stayed safe at home and I ran about the universe playing hero. I cared for people and I lost them, and it hurt, it hurt worse than I thought I could bear every single time, but I never lost everything.”

“And now you’re afraid to have anything.”

“Of course I am!”

“Even though you already have me. And you already care about me.”

“Well. Yes.”

“So you’re saying, what, you don’t want to get too involved with me because if you do you’ll be sad when I die?”

“No, because I’ll be _sad_ when you want to go back to medical school and finish living your life,” he snapped. “Because you’ve got your life, and I’ve got mine, and they can intersect for a while, but not for long. Not even by human standards.”

Martha considered this.

“But are you, I mean, interested? You’re sort of the master of mixed signals, you know.”

The Doctor grimaced at her choice of phrasing.

“I don’t mean to be,” he said. “I’ve spent a lot of time around humans, and been in relationships with them, but I’m not one. Yes, I’m attracted to you, but that doesn’t mean the same thing for me that it would for a hu--”

She kissed him.

He wasn’t concentrating on the telepathic aspect of the kiss that time, caught off guard as he was. She tasted like cheap wine and human hormones and Martha, and he could feel her desire for him and her esteem for him. The intensity with which she looked up to him was probably unhealthy, but it felt so good. She tasted incredible and her mind was so beautifully organized, like a smaller version of one of his own peoples’, and a greedy part of him drank in her near-worship.

“We’re drunk,” he said, pushing her away.

“Apparently you won’t kiss me unless ginger beer or Judoon are involved,” Martha retorted. “Even though it sure seems like you want to.”

“Fine, yes, I want to kiss you,” he said. “But there are all sorts of reasons why I shouldn’t, and--”

She kissed him again, and he allowed himself to return it for a moment before pulling back.

“No, really,” he said. “You need to know, I can’t help but see into your mind when we’re kissing.”

“Same way as when you touch my temples and go into my mind, you mean?” she asked. “That’s fine. You showed me how to hide things.”

“Right, but if we were to--well, I don’t want to make any assumptions, but it seems as if you may be interested in slightly more than kissing--”

“Assume away,” Martha said.

“We can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m not human!”

“I really, really, really don’t mind,” Martha said.

“Yes, well, that’s lovely, but you could literally die.”

“I could _what_?”

“Die. Or go mad. Either way, really the sort of thing that should be discussed while sober.” The Doctor got unsteadily to his feet.

“No, wait,” she said, reaching for him. “Come back. We’ll talk about it tomorrow, and I won’t press it tonight. Can’t we just kiss a bit more?”

“Well,” he said, hesitantly sitting down again, “As long as you know that it really can’t escalate…”

“I know,” she said. “I just...this is so nice.”

The Doctor held her and did his best to savor it, to enjoy the way her kisses and touches gradually grew sleepy, the way that he could feel her lovely mind slipping into dreams. But once she’d fallen asleep, all he could think about was loss, both remembered and anticipated.


	4. Communication

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Talking! About feelings! Also, about stuff!

The Doctor left the bedroom and his ruminations a few hours before dawn and began stripping the dingy wallpaper from the wall in the room where he was supposed to leave the message. The way the long strips of paper pulled away was satisfying on a strangely visceral level, giving him a sudden insight into why humans sometimes picked at scabs.

He got a bit carried away and ended up ripping the wallpaper off the walls in several rooms. Oh well, they were due for a change of appearance anyway. Maybe he’d get the TARDIS to make a room full of peeling wallpaper next time he felt antsy...once he got the TARDIS back. Assuming he did get the TARDIS back.

By the time he’d finished pulling every scrap of nauseatingly puce wallpaper from the upstairs rooms, Martha and Mrs. Peterson were taking breakfast together downstairs.

“You see, my son-in-law is Pakistani,” Mrs. Peterson was saying. “Dear Robert--my late husband--he always worried about our Sarah, and he didn’t particularly approve at first, but I put my foot down, you know. Robert, I said, we’ve raised a smart girl and she knows her own heart, and if she’s in love then that’s that. It’s no good trying to get in between.”

“My mum slapped Sam the first time she met him,” Martha said.

“And it didn’t stop you, did it?” Mrs. Peterson said. “You went and married him anyway. My parents approved of my Robert, but I should like to think that if one spends a lifetime teaching literature, one at least learns enough not to cast oneself as a Capulet.”

The Doctor entered the room as Martha laughed.

“Good morning, ladies,” he said. “Ooh, sausages, lovely.”

“Help yourself,” Mrs. Peterson said. “Can’t have people thinking your wife doesn’t feed you. You’re skin and bones.”

“I have the full complement of organs, thanks,” he said cheerfully as he scooped sausages onto his plate. “And I’m a better cook than Martha, to boot.”

“When you don’t get distracted and wander off halfway through cooking,” Martha said. “Remember the soup that boiled away?”

“That was one time!”

“And the charcoal biscuits?”

The Doctor couldn’t respond to this slander because his mouth was full of sausage.

“So have you finished whatever it is that you’re working on while your wife is out at work all day?” Mrs. Peterson asked somewhat severely. “Your invention?”

“Oh, er, very nearly.”

“What precisely is it intended to do?”

“Ah…” The Doctor tried to think of an explanation that wouldn’t involve time travel. “Well...it goes ding.”

“It goes ding?”

“Yep.”

“At random, or at the push of a button, or…?”

The Doctor could see that Martha was trying to hold back laughter at his expense. Mrs. Peterson reminded him of certain professors he’d had back at the Academy.

“Well, no, it goes ding when there’s...stuff. It detects stuff, and then it goes ding.”

“I see.” Mrs. Peterson shook her head. “You know, I knew a man like you once, a very long time ago. Back before I met my Robert. He was impossible. I very nearly ran off with him.”

“What happened?” Martha asked.

“Oh...time, I suppose. It was all so long ago, now.” She stood up and began to slowly clear the table, a faraway look on her face.

“Thank you for breakfast, Mrs. Peterson,” Martha said. “It was lovely.”

“Oh, no trouble at all, dear,” she replied. “Always good to have company. Good morning to you both.”

As this was obviously intended as a dismissal, the Doctor scraped the last bits of sausage onto his fork and into his mouth, then he and Martha left the kitchen. Martha burst into laughter as soon as they were on the stairs.

“It goes _ding_ when there’s _stuff_ ,” she said. “Oh my God, Doctor.”

“What? It’s as much of an explanation as I could give without mentioning temporal mechanics!” he protested. “What was I supposed to say, it’ll help us find other people who’ve been sent back in time?”

“You could have said it detects, I don’t know, radiation or chemicals or...anything. Anything other than _stuff_.”

“Well, it doesn’t detect radiation or chemicals. It detects _stuff_ that your language doesn’t have the vocabulary for, not in this era anyway. Or in yours, for that matter.” They went into their room and took their accustomed places--him in the desk chair, her on the bed.

“So, wait, the TARDIS translates for you, right? What does it do when you say something that can’t be expressed in the local language?”

“Oh, no, the TARDIS doesn’t usually translate for me,” he said. “It certainly isn’t at the moment. We’re out of range. But I generally speak the local language wherever I am.”

“Well, fine, but what if we were in, I don’t know, ancient Greece and I said ‘internet’ or ‘spaceship’?”

“It’d probably break the words down to their roots and translate those. Or, well, it would depend on the context and what you were trying to get across. She really is very good at translations.” The Doctor sighed.

“You miss it--her--don’t you?” Martha asked.

“It’s odd, being alone in my head,” the Doctor admitted. “Time Lords aren’t supposed to live like that.”

“Would it help if you connected with me again, like you did back when we started traveling together?” she asked. He’d touched her mind a few times, showing her how to deal with trauma directly, from the inside. Making the connection had been difficult, but once he was there, he found he had very little to teach her; her mind was beautifully organized.

“I...well, yes, it would,” he admitted, scratching the back of his head. “That’s sort of the same thing I said we should talk about this morning, when we were, um, talking last night.”

Martha blushed and looked away.

“I didn’t mean to...I’m sorry for being so pushy, last night,” she said. “I just…”

“I know,” he said. “There’s a lot of...feelings happening, what with when I was John and all, and honestly it’s a mess.”

“Right,” she sighed. “So here’s the part where you let me down easy.”

“Nah,” he said, surprising himself. He hadn’t realized he’d come to a firm decision, but it seemed that he had. “I mean, that would be the sensible thing, but I’m fairly certain that of the two of us, you’re the sensible one. Just ask Mrs. Peterson.”

“You mean…?”

“If you still want, we can...well, have some sort of ill-advised temporally-complicated interspecies relationship, I suppose.”

“...how about we go on a date, instead?” Martha asked.

“Yes, that does sound much nicer, doesn’t it,” the Doctor said. “Let’s do that.”

“But first you need to tell me what all that business about dying or going mad was,” she said firmly.

“Oh, right.” He grimaced. He’d had this conversation, oh, half a dozen times now, and it was always terribly awkward. His people would have said that was what he got for fraternizing with lower races. He would have run off again and picked up a brilliant new companion, just to spite them. “Well, you know I’m a telepath.”

Martha’s eyes lit up. “You said you can see into my mind when we kiss,” she said eagerly. “Does sex have some sort of telepathic component for you? Does it magnify the pair-bonding instinct? I’ve been wondering for ages how telepathy would evolve, especially in a species that’s clearly perfectly capable of communicating verbally.”

“Oh, well, we evolved on a planet that already had a form of intelligent life,” the Doctor said. “Well...already isn’t quite the word, but it’ll do. TARDISes--or rather, the life forms that form the sentient components of them--don’t interact with time the same way that you do. Or even the same way that I do. They also don’t communicate verbally, so they sort of...encouraged us down an evolutionary pathway that would let us communicate.”

“So they mucked about with your evolution, and then you mucked about with ours?”

“Not me personally!” the Doctor protested. “And at any rate, we’re getting off the subject, which is that for Time Lords, sexual, er, completion involves the complete transfer of consciousness. I’d have your entire mind in my head. You wouldn’t be able to hide anything. And more to the point, you’d have my entire mind in _your_ head, and if we don’t take steps to prepare you for that, the consequences would be extremely unpleasant.”

“Wait, so if we have sex, I’ll learn everything you know?”

“No. There just isn’t enough room in your mind. That’s sort of the point I’m trying to make.”

“Oh.” Martha looked disappointed.

“It’s not entirely a matter of cognitive ability,” he said. “For one thing, I’ve nine hundred and some years of memories in here, and for another, I’ve got several more senses than you, so I’m taking in considerably more data every moment.”

“All right,” she said, apparently mollified. “So what would these preparations involve?”

“Basically it’s a matter of getting you used to being exposed to my mind. We’d connect telepathically and I’d, well, show it to you, for lack of a better term. Put it in a bit at a time, until you can handle the whole thing.”

Martha blinked at him for a moment, then dissolved into hysterical laughter.

“What are you...oh. Oh! I didn’t mean...not that…” He flushed. “ _That_ is a perfectly normal size, thank you very much. Two point three centimeters above the human norm, actually.”

“You actually measured?” she giggled. “You are such a bloke.”

“I didn’t. I just know. It’s a Time Lord thing.” Yes, all right, he had measured. Needed to know how he’d stacked up against his previous self, obviously; trying to get himself and Rose through that change without damage to their relationship had been tricky enough without leaving any variables unknown.

He didn’t want to think about Rose right now.

“Can we try it now, then?” Martha asked.

“Sure,” he said with slightly forced enthusiasm. “No time like the present.”

“Um.” Martha glanced at his lips, then away. “Do you want to do the fingers-to-temples thing, or…?”

Well, in for a penny, in for a pound. The Doctor leaned forward and kissed her.


	5. A Date

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dating is not the Doctor's forte.

A date. The Doctor could go on dates. He had before, right? Granted, he didn’t generally realize that he was on a date until it was at least halfway over, but that was surely just proof of how good he was at them. Did it without even trying.

And even if he turned out to be rubbish at on-purpose dates, it would get them out of the house. Out of the bedroom, in particular. Kissing was lovely and kissing Martha was spectacular, but kissing Martha while intentionally bringing her into his mind…

He’d never before been with anyone who was so very excited by his alien-ness, whose immediate response to being exposed to the core of his mind wasn’t confusion or fear or even acceptance but arousal-tinged awe. It made him feel powerful and wanted and, somehow, dreadfully alone. She’d gone limp and trembling in his arms and it had been shamefully difficult to remind himself that she wasn’t ready for more yet, that he needed to gently push her out of his mind and back into herself and awkwardly clear his throat and suggest that they get a pizza.

“Brilliant invention, pizza,” he told her with his mouth full of said invention. They had a booth at a pizza place and two glasses of Coke and a pepperoni pizza to share. He was pretty sure that was acceptable date practice (particularly when one didn’t have much money). “Do you know, not a lot of planets have anything like cheese. One of Earth’s biggest exports once you’re trading with the rest of the universe.”

“Not surprising,” Martha said. “Cheese is amazing. And fairly unusual chemically, I suppose.”

“Well, yes, but a big part of its popularity is its origin,” the Doctor said. “Some people like trying weird alien food, and ‘a liquid squeezed out of an animal and then left to go bad’ is pretty weird.”

Martha laughed.

“Well, everything’s weird if you describe it like that,” she said. “I mean, dough gets light and fluffy because of the gasses yeast release, that’s pretty weird.”

The Doctor shrugged.

“I’m not the universal arbiter of weirdness,” he said. “Went out for it once, but I got disqualified. Too close to the topic for impartiality, they said.”

“Can’t imagine why.”

“Probably favoritism or nepotism or something.”

“Probably.”

They went back to chewing in companionable silence for a while. The pizza really was quite good.

“So is there anyone in this time you’d like to pop in on, while we’re stuck here?” Martha asked after a while.

“In this time? Nah. Would’ve been much more convenient if we were, oh, ten years or so in the future. I could’ve introduced you around at UNIT.”

“Right. Jo Grant and all. Wouldn’t that have been awkward, though?”

“Hm? Why would...oh. Jo and I weren’t, ah, together.” The Doctor shifted uncomfortably.

“Really? I’m sorry, the way you talked about her, I sort of thought…”

“No, I...well.” He’d told her about regeneration after the ‘burn with me’ incident, but he hadn’t actually mentioned that he’d already done it a good number of times. “I’ve regenerated since then. I was much older, and she was very young, and I didn’t really have much to offer, stuck on Earth and all.”

“So, what, you just never said anything? But you were…?”

“I was, yes. But I don’t think she was.” He scratched the back of his head. “Anyway, it was a long time ago.”

“Suppose you have a lot of exes, here and there through space and time,” Martha observed. “Being 900 and all.”

“Not so very many, really.” The Doctor put down his pizza, unable to swallow around the lump in his throat or avoid going over the list in his head. _Dead, forced to forget me, alive but alone, dead…_ “What about you?”

“Oh...a couple. Haven’t had a lot of time with my studies and all, you know.”

“Well. Perks of a time machine, I suppose.”

“Yeah.” She sighed. “Wish I’d had my books with me when we got sent back. I’m going to have so much reviewing to do…”

“I might be able to help with that,” the Doctor offered. “Fix some memories more firmly in your mind, that sort of thing. If you want.”

“Really? That’d be great!” Martha’s eyes lit up.

“And I do know a thing or two about human anatomy myself, you know,” he said.

“Yeah, I’ll bet you do,” she said, smirking.

“I didn’t mean--”

“Doctor, I didn’t misunderstand you. I’m flirting with you.”

“Oh. Right.” He took a swig of coke. “I only seem to be good at that when I’m doing it by accident.”

“That’s all right. It’s sort of cute.”

“Cute, hm?” He raised an eyebrow and lowered his voice. “I got a pretty good luck at what you think of me earlier, and it didn’t seem like ‘cute’ was at the top of the list…”

“It’s on there!” she protested, looking flustered. “Um...when can we try that again, anyway?”

“Depends on you,” he said. “How’s your head?”

“Feels fine now that I’ve got some food and caffeine in me.”

“We could probably try again tonight, then. But you have to tell me if it gets to be too much.”

“I promise to accurately report my symptoms, Doctor,” she said, rolling her eyes.

“I mean it.”

“So do I.” She met his eyes levelly. “Really. I believe you about the danger, and I’m not going to muck about when it’s my brain on the line. I need my brain.”

“Good.” He smiled. “I quite like your brain as it is.”

“Yeah,” she said, and looked down at her pizza. “I felt that.”

Her voice held embarrassment and pleasure and something almost like awe. The Doctor knew he really ought to try to do something about that. He was entirely aware that half the reason he needed other people around was to keep his ego in check, and although she put up a good front, now that he’d been in her mind he realized that Martha thought nearly as highly of him as he himself did. And she didn’t have that tempering dose of hatred mixed in, the way that he did.

Egotism and self-hatred mixed together...if he’d only been able to deal with the trauma of the Time War properly, he never would have ended up in such a state. But it was too big to deal with alone, and Rose had only just begun to telepathically help him sort through it when he’d lost her.

“Hello? Earth to Doctor?” Martha said, and he realized he’d been ignoring her.

“Hm? Yes? Sorry, I was just thinking.”

“I asked if you wanted the last slice.”

“I already had half the pizza…”

“Yeah, but I’m full.”

“Well, it’d be a shame to let it go to waste.” He helped himself. “So, what do you want to do with the rest of your day off?”

“Actually, I was wondering if there was any way I could help you with your detector,” Martha said. “Or finding the parts for it, at least.”

“We-ell, the last bit I need is going to be sort of tricky,” the Doctor said. “The best thing would be an LED, but--”

Martha smacked her forehead.

“Wish you’d said so earlier, Doctor,” she said. “I had a little reading light in my pocket when we got sent back. It’s got an LED.”

“Really? Brilliant!” He beamed at her and jumped to his feet. “I can get started right away, then!”

“But...the pizza?” Martha said.

“Oh, right!” He grabbed the remainder of the slice and grinned at her. “I’ll just eat this on the way back to the house. You’ve got the money, so you can take care of paying and things, right? I should have the detector done by tomorrow!”

He was halfway back to the house and finished with the slice before it occurred to him that he’d probably been in gross violation of date etiquette. Oh well, Martha wanted to get back to the TARDIS just as badly as he did. She’d understand.


	6. Angel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Filling in some blanks about the Weeping Angels.

The Doctor found Martha’s reading light when he got back to the house, disassembled it, and immediately began working on his detector. It was an interesting challenge, using substandard materials and no tools but his sonic screwdriver, and he was soon entirely absorbed in it.

“Do you want to take a break for dinner?” Martha asked at some point, startling him. He hadn’t noticed when she came in.

“Martha! Oh, er, no, I’m at a delicate bit. Apologize to Mrs. Peterson for me, will you?”

She sighed, and went to leave the room.

“And--and I’m sorry for being a rubbish date, Martha. But this is our ticket home, you know?”

“I know, Doctor,” she said, and came up behind him to carefully hug him around the shoulders without disturbing anything. She also kissed him on the cheek. He smiled.

“We’ll do some more telepathy later. Once it’s working, I’ll have nothing to do but wait for it to activate, and then we can track down our fellow time refugee.”

“Sounds lovely,” she said, and left.

Several hours later, he was down to the last bit of wiring. Once he’d completed the circuit, the device should stay dormant until there was a temporal anomaly somewhere nearby--which made it practically impossible to test, unfortunately. He glanced over at Martha, about to tell her the good news, but found that she was asleep with an open copy of _Gray’s Anatomy_ on the pillow next to her. So she’d found a way to study after all, his clever girl.

Not that she was _his_ , exactly...oh, whatever.

He completed the circuit, and the device immediately lit up with a “ding!”

“Hm? Wha?” Martha said from the bed. “Doctor?”

“That’s odd,” he said, looking at the device.

“Did you get it working?” she asked.

“Well, I thought so, but it’s indicating that there’s _already_ a temporal anomaly within range...quite close, actually, from the display...which seems rather unlikely.” He frowned.

“Well, it should lead us to it if there is one, yeah? Let’s go find out,” she said, getting out of bed and pulling on her trousers.

“Don’t you have to work early tomorrow?” he said, turning around so she could dress in relative privacy.

“Doctor, this is the first chance at an adventure I’ve had since we got here. Being a little sleep-deprived tomorrow is totally worth it.”

“All right, but there is a chance that it’s a false alarm,” the Doctor warned her. “I may have made it too sensitive--hard to tell.”

“Well, either way, it’ll at least feel exciting for a bit,” Martha said. They crept out of the house together, the Doctor wincing with every “ding” of the machine (and chance of waking the formidable Mrs. Peterson) until they were out the door.

“The good news is, the readings have changed as we left the house, so it isn’t just picking up our leftover readings as time travelers,” he told Martha. “The...well, I wouldn’t say _bad_ , but the odd news is that it seems to be leading us into the back garden.”

“Maybe the angels dislocated someone in time but not in space?” she suggested.

“Odd that they’d do that to the next person when they didn’t do it to us,” he mused. “But it’s possible.”

They followed the device’s guidance into the overgrown quiet of the garden. The walls kept a good deal of the light of London out, leaving the full moon to lend a blue tint to their surroundings.

“It’d be sort of romantic out here if I didn’t keep feeling like I ought to check over my shoulder for Weeping Angels,” Martha said.

“I suppose,” the Doctor said. “Considering what’s available, anyway. Just wait until we’re back on the TARDIS and I’ll take you someplace that’ll romance your pants off.”

“Wouldn’t be that hard,” Martha said. “Your bedroom would work.”

“Well, er, I, ah--look, it seems to be coming from behind that shrub!” the Doctor said, and rushed towards said shrubbery.

The shrub was impressively overgrown. The Doctor pushed aside some of its sprawling branches and found that there was a shallow impression in the ground under it. Clearly, it had been made quite some time ago, because it was overgrown with grass, but it had the look of a small crater.

“I think something may have crashed here,” he said. “Hold aside these branches, will you, Martha?”

The Doctor crawled under the branches of the shrub, muddying the knees of his trousers (which, fortunately, were some that he’d bought with Martha, not the ones that went with his suit.) The center of the crater was entirely devoid of grass, and held a smooth grey stone about the length of his forearm. It didn’t look like a meteor; it looked more like granite.

Not taking his eyes off the thing, he slowly crawled back out, picked up the detector, and turned it off.

“Doctor?” Martha asked, letting the branches of the shrub fall back into place. “What was it?”

“The detector is too sensitive,” he said. “I’ll have to fine-tune it.”

“But...what’s in there? What set it off?”

“An Angel,” he said. “Dormant. It must have nearly starved while it was traveling here, and then the fall through the atmosphere...but they’re remarkably hardy creatures, Weeping Angels.”

“One of those things is in there?” Martha asked, turning to stare towards the shrub. “Shouldn’t we, well, do something about that?”

“Can’t,” the Doctor said. “If we can see it, it’s stone. But while no one is looking, it’s gathering strength, little by little. Stealing the quiet little futures of microorganisms and grass and insects, sending them back a day or two--that’s all it can manage, right now. But it’ll recover, eventually.”

“Stone, sure, but you can break stone,” Martha pointed out. “What happens if we take a sledgehammer to it?”

“That’s how they reproduce,” the Doctor said. “Well, one way--they also split when they’ve fed enough, but if we break it, there will be more of them. It’ll take longer, but eventually each piece, each little shard will grow into a whole Angel. All we can do is leave it.”

“Is it safe, having it there?”

“It’s not going to be strong enough to move for at least, oh, another decade,” he said. “We’ll be long gone by then.”

“I suppose Mrs. Peterson probably will be too,” Martha mused.

“Yes. Well, now we know how they got here in the first place,” the Doctor said. “Let’s go back to the house.”

They walked back to the house hand in hand, both frequently glancing back over their shoulders. Martha breathed a sigh of relief when they were back in their room with the lights on.

“Don’t know how I’m going to sleep, knowing that thing’s out there,” she said.

“Well, I’ll be here all night, making some adjustments to the detector,” the Doctor said. “I should be able to get it just sensitive enough that it’ll go off if there’s a temporal displacement event anywhere in the city, or an Angel active anywhere within, oh, ten meters? So we’ll have a warning.”

“That’s good,” Martha said. She continued to sit on the bed, looking at him.

“I could help you get to sleep, if you’d like,” he offered. “Not invasive at all--basically just flip a switch in your mind.”

“I was sort of hoping we could do a bit more telepathy,” she said.

“I’d like to, but…” It was much too easy to imagine the Angel--or another one, one that was already mobile--appearing behind them while they were distracted. “Once I’ve finished this, we’ll be safe enough for that sort of thing, but until then…”

“Right,” she sighed. “Always something. Go on and help me sleep, then.”

“Get yourself comfortable first. It’s pretty much instantaneous,” he said.

When she had changed and gotten into bed, he came over and looked down at her. For a moment, seeing her lying there looking up at him, he wanted to change his earlier statement...but it was his job to keep them safe. That had to come first.

He raised a hand to her forehead, then changed his mind and bent to kiss her. It was the work of a moment to put her mind into a deep sleep.

“Good night, Martha,” he whispered, knowing she wouldn’t hear. Then he turned back to his work.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those who are only familiar with the TV show, _Gray's Anatomy_ is also a standards-defining anatomy textbook. Versions of it have been in print since 1858, with the most recent printed in 2015. Of course, each version makes changes, but I imagine that things have stayed the same enough that Martha could get *some* use out of a 1969 version.


	7. Waiting

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains explicit sexual content.

With the detector completed, fine-tuned, and constantly on his person, the Doctor found that he had nothing left to do but wait. This was not an ideal state of existence.

He finished papering and cleaning the house and started tackling the garden, weeding and repairing and organizing as best he could while entirely avoiding the one shrub that contained a nascent Angel. It began to look a bit odd, even to his inexpert eye (well, he couldn’t be an expert in _everything_ , and 20th-century Earth landscaping hadn’t been particularly high on his list), having that one patch of untouched chaos left over.

“You’ve done wonders with the place,” Mrs. Peterson told him one day over a cup of tea. “I’ll admit, I had my doubts about you, but you’ve more than met your side of our arrangement. My Sarah’s always telling me that the place is too big for me to keep by myself, but I just couldn’t leave, you know.”

“Why not?” the Doctor asked. “I mean, it’s a lovely place, but there are plenty of other lovely places to see.”

“You’ll think me a foolish old woman, but ever since I first set eyes on Wester Drumlins, I’ve felt that I was meant to be here,” she said. “Love at first sight, almost--but not love, exactly. Just...rightness.”

“I’m more of a new-place-every-day sort of man,” the Doctor said. “Can’t really imagine having that sort of feeling of, well, belonging, I suppose.”

“It’s a great comfort to me, most of the time,” Mrs. Peterson said, a faraway look in her eyes. “Sometimes, I must admit, I wish that I was somewhere else. Anywhere else, really. Somewhere new. But it’s important that I stay here.”

“Well.” The Doctor didn’t quite know how to respond to that. “I hope it’s a bit more comfortable and a bit less lonely, now.”

“Oh, certainly,” she said with a smile. “As I said, you’ve done a wonderful job. And your Martha is a treasure.”

“She is, isn’t she,” he said.

He tried not to let his restlessness bother Martha. She was stuck here too, and stuck working in a shop, and (he knew, although she never said) stuck dealing with 1969 racism. He wondered whether she would have mentioned it to him, would have complained about it, if it hadn’t been for 1913 and John Smith. Some of the things he could remember saying to her made him wince, for all that he had been another man.

Their now-nightly telepathy sessions did a good deal to keep their time from being unbearable. Martha’s mind was a lovely thing, a work of art, really, and he delighted in showing it to her from his perspective.

It was also a bit of an exercise in frustration.

“Stop, stop,” he found himself gasping into her mouth one evening, doing his best to dislodge her from his mind gently. His hands had somehow found their way under her shirt, and she’d already taken off her bra for bed, so they were rather full of lovely warm soft Martha. There was also quite a bit of lovely warm Martha sitting on his lap.

“I think I’m ready,” she said, breathing raggedly against his neck. Her breasts rose and fell with her lungs, pressing farther into his hands. “My head’s barely hurting at all.”

“You’re not, I know you’re not,” he groaned, forcing his apparently self-willed hands from her breasts to her waist so they could move her off of him. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“I wouldn’t mind,” she said. “If it hurt a bit, I mean. If you’re sure I won’t die or go mad, I wouldn’t mind if it hurt.”

“I’m not sure, that’s the problem,” he said, and his lips were apparently against her neck now, and trailing down to the low neckline of her vest top. “My mind’s a bit broken and I don’t want to harm you, Martha, I want you safe.”

“Mm, all right, but can we keep doing this for a bit?” she asked, arching to press her breasts closer to him.

The responsible answer would have been “no,” but since it had already been well-established that he wasn’t the responsible one, he pushed her top up to her underarms and let her work on getting it the rest of the way off while he eagerly applied his mouth to her nipples.

Most humans likely would have been confused--possibly even insulted--by the way that he managed to get himself under control now that their contact was purely physical. It was the telepathy that was dangerous, that held a chance of him losing control and hurting Martha. Licking and nipping at her breasts, letting his hands explore her back and her arse and her thighs, listening to her lovely panting moans, that was delicious but safe.

“You are so very lovely,” he murmured against the smooth, soft skin over her ribs, sliding his hands up to the waistline of her trousers. “May I?”

“Yes! Please, Doctor, yes.” She helpfully wriggled out of her trousers and knickers in one go, leaving her fully exposed to his appreciative gaze, and reached for the buttons of his shirt. “Wouldn’t you like to…?”

“No, no, I’m fine,” he said. “Trust me.”

She kissed him, radiating such complete trust and pliability that he felt himself beginning to harden again. He pulled his lips from hers and began kissing his way down, taking detours at the base of her neck and at her nipples but clearly broadcasting his target.

When he reached her vulva, he found that all of John Smith’s memories were unusually accessible, letting him know what she liked, what would make her squirm deliciously. Two fingers sliding inside her without warning had her bucking up against his mouth.

“You’re, you’re colder than he was,” she gasped.

“Oh, sorry--”

“No, I like it,” she said. “Reminds me you’re you. Please don’t stop.”

He went back at it with a will, touching and licking and twisting and savoring her taste, her moans. She was repeating his name rhythmically, desperately, and he thought he could listen to it forever, Doctor Doctor Doctor Doctor Doctor…

Then she lapsed into a wordless moan, clenching around his fingers convulsively, and he decided that no, if he was going to listen to one sound forever, he’d prefer that it be that one.

He brought her down slowly, gently pulling his fingers from her heat, and slid up her body to hold her against him.

“God, I needed that,” she sighed.

“Me too,” he said, and found that it was true. He reached down to pull the blanket over the both of them and held her until long after she’d fallen asleep.


	8. Billy Shipton

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Awkward conversations abound!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, have I been neglecting this story. Hoping to get back on track!
> 
> (And yes, if you've been reading my other stories, sex workers do show up a lot in my writing.)

It was another week before they picked up a signal from the detector. Of course, it would happen to go off inside his pocket during supper with Mrs. Peterson.  
  
“How on Earth did you manage to fit that thing in there?” she asked when he pulled it out. “And would you mind putting it away at the table?”  
  
“My legs are even skinnier than they look,” he lied. “And I’m afraid this is an emergency. Martha, let’s go.”  
  
The two of them were out of the dining room before Mrs. Peterson had a chance to gather herself to protest.  
  
“So what do you think?” Martha asked. “Angel or displacee?”  
  
“The latter, I should think,” he said. “The signal’s coming from far enough away that we wouldn’t be picking it up if it was an angel. Relatively nearby, though. Walking distance. Come on! We’ve got to get to him before he wanders off or we’ll never find him.”  
  
The detector said that they were very nearly there when the Doctor realized the name he’d been hearing called was intended to be his.  
  
“Sam!” An out-of-breath and visibly frightened Diane, unusually wearing a t-shirt and jeans, ran up to him. “God, are you deaf? Don’t go into that alley! A man just appeared there, right out of thin air!”  
  
“Oh, good!” he said. “Been looking for him. Nothing to worry about. Come on, Martha!”  
  
“But--”  
  
“I’ll explain later,” he said, and he and Martha hurried into the alley.  
  
There he was, as promised: Billy Shipton, fresh from 2006 and very confused. Between them, the Doctor and Martha helped him recover from his disorienting displacement and started to explain the situation to him.  
  
The Doctor didn’t realize until they went to leave the alley that Diane was still waiting just outside it.  
  
“Sam, what’s going on?” she asked. “He just appeared out of nowhere!”  
  
“I promise, it really isn’t anything to worry about,” he said. “Listen, I’ll meet you tonight and tell you what’s going on, okay? We need to get him settled just now.”  
  
“Fine, then,” she said. “But you’d better explain!”  
  
“Yes, yes,” he said, and the three of them walked away, him and Martha still supporting Billy.  
  
“Who was that?” Martha asked when they were out of earshot.  
  
“That was Diane! I’m sure I’ve mentioned her before,” he said.  
  
“She’s hot,” Billy chipped in.  
  
“I suppose so,” the Doctor said.  
  
“Meeting hot girls doesn’t seem to be working out well for me.” He grinned at Martha. “Present company excluded, of course.”  
  
“Let’s focus on getting you a place for now,” Martha said. “If you must flirt, save it for later.”  
  
“Oh, right,” the Doctor realized. “We’ll need money to get him a place to stay.”  
  
“Doctor,” Martha said with an amused look, “I’ve been saving since I got that job. We should have enough to get him set up somewhere cheap.”  
  
“Martha, you’re amazing,” the Doctor said.  
  
“Well, the rent is so cheap where we’re staying, and meals are included and all,” she said modestly. “And we had everything in your pockets to start us off.”  
  
“What am I going to do?” Billy said, ashen-faced. “I had a degree, a career! My references haven’t even been born yet.”  
  
“Oh, it’ll work out,” the Doctor said. “Ever thought about getting into the recording industry?”  
  
He did end up having to sonic a cash point; Martha’s savings weren’t quite enough for rent, deposit, and new clothes, but they got Billy set up in reasonable comfort and left him to sleep off the displacement.  
  
“I feel bad,” Martha said. “Soon as he’s helped us get the TARDIS back, we’ll be leaving him here. Doesn’t seem fair.”  
  
“No, I suppose it doesn’t,” the Doctor said. “But the past’s not so bad, really.”  
  
“Says the white man.”  
  
There didn’t seem to be anything to say in response to that, so he stuck his hands in his pockets.  
  
“What are you going to tell Diane?” Martha asked. “How did you meet her, anyway?”  
  
“Oh, suppose I’ll tell her the truth. Won’t be the first time someone’s thought I was a nutter. And I met her while I was out for a wander, while you were asleep.”  
  
“Right, I remember you mentioning now. Something about her being at work?”  
  
“Yes, she’s a sex worker.” He frowned. “I suppose that term isn’t in use yet, is it? Haven’t asked her what she’d call herself.”  
  
“Hang on,” Martha said in a disbelieving voice, “After I go to sleep you go off to see a prostitute?”  
  
“What?” He blinked. “Well, yes, but not...I haven’t _hired_ her or anything. Couldn’t if I wanted to, remember? Telepathy and all?”  
  
“Right,” she said, sounding relieved. “Sorry. I know you wouldn’t cheat on me.”  
  
“Er…” He scratched the back of his neck. “I suppose exclusivity is...something we should talk about, isn’t it.”  
  
Martha raised her eyebrows.  
  
“Well, we’ve already had the ‘you make a great mistress but would be a terrible wife’ talk, but I was under the impression that didn’t apply any longer,” she said acidly.  
  
“What? No!” He rubbed his forehead, trying to think of the right way to explain. “Martha, you mean worlds to me, but...hang on, are you saying you want to get _married_?”  
  
His voice rose to a squeak on the last word.  
  
“Well, I mean, obviously it’s early days, but I know I want to marry someone eventually,” she said. “And you date people before you marry them, and right now you’re the one I’m dating, so…”  
  
“That’s...that’s really not a thing that’s ever going to happen,” he said. “Not because you’re not good enough! I just...I mean…”  
  
“Commitment issues. Right,” Martha said. “We can shelve this before I completely scare you off, but...no shagging other people while you’re with me, all right? I think that’s a pretty reasonable request.”  
  
“Well, it would be, but, life we lead and all, what exactly does ‘while’ mean?” he asked.  
  
“Hmm, that’s a fair question,” she said. “Give me a minute.”  
  
She thought, and he worried. What if what she said was something he couldn’t agree to? Would she really just...end it?  
  
“All right...if the last time you saw me, we were still involved, and you expect that to be the case the next time you see me as well, then we’re still involved. If we’re still involved, but you know you won’t be able to see me for at least a year from your perspective, then you can get involved with someone else, but you have to let me know that it happened. And if we’re going to be spending a long time around someone else who’s still involved with you from her perspective, we’ll all sit down and decide what to do about it.” Martha thought for a moment. “I think that’s everything. What do you think?”  
  
“That’s surprisingly thorough,” the Doctor said.  
  
“I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this.”  
  
“Apparently.” The Doctor pondered for a moment. “I can’t think of anything to add to that just now, but I’ll let you know if I do.”  
  
Martha smiled, and put her arm through the Doctor’s.  
  
“There, see?” she said. “That wasn’t so bad.”  
  
“What wasn’t?” he asked.  
  
“Our first fight.” She smiled. “Got through it fine.”  
  
“I suppose we did.”  
  
The Doctor went to find Diane after Martha fell asleep that night. He’d been spending some time chatting with her every few days, compensating her for her time with trinkets from his pockets, which seemed to amuse her (particularly since one of them had been a fairly valuable pair of earrings).  
  
“So are you going to tell me what the hell that was all about?” she asked as soon as he walked up.  
  
“Yes, but you probably won’t believe me,” he said.  
  
“Sam, a man appeared out of thin air right in front of me,” she said. “Didn’t go to uni, but I remember physics class, and that’s not the sort of thing that can happen.”  
  
“Oh, well, not if he’d actually appeared out of _nowhere_ ,” the Doctor agreed. “But he really came from the future.”  
  
“The future,” Diane repeated.  
  
“Yep. 2007, as a matter of fact.” He grinned. “And before you ask, I know this because I’m also a time traveler.”  
  
“Right. I’m sure you’ve all got time machines in 2007.”  
  
“I said you wouldn’t believe me,” he said with a shrug. “And no, humans don’t have access to time travel until after the 48th century. He was sent back by aliens.”  
  
“Oh, of course. Aliens from beyond the year 2000. Now it all makes sense.” She rubbed her forehead. “Maybe I’m the one who’s gone mad.”  
  
“It’d be a fairly rubbish lie,” he said. “I could have made up something better.”  
  
“Yeah, but maybe you just felt like messing with the poor, gullible hooker,” she said. “I don’t know how you get your kicks.”  
  
“Oh, come on, now,” he said, affronted. “I thought we were friends. I wouldn’t do a thing like that.”  
  
“No, I don’t think you would,” she said, and sighed. “Fine. Either it’s something absurd, time-travel and aliens or not, or it’s something too classified for you to tell me. Suppose it doesn’t particularly matter either way.”  
  
“Really?” he asked. “It doesn’t matter if the world is a bit bigger and stranger than you thought it was?”  
  
“Course the world’s big and strange,” she said. “But you move on with your life anyway. I don’t know how lightbulbs work--I mean, it’s something to do with electricity and filaments, but I don’t really understand it--but I’ve accepted that they keep my apartment lit.”  
  
“Suppose that’s fair.”  
  
They stood in silence for a moment as Diane lit a cigarette.  
  
“Are you from the future, then?” she asked. “The 48th century or whatever?”  
  
“No, no,” he said. “I’m from another planet.”  
  
“Ah.” She took a drag. “Nice disguise. Here to take over the world? Or maybe save us from ourselves, sort of thing?”  
  
“Nah, just passing through.”  
  
“Oh, good.” She considered for a moment. “Nope, still don’t believe you. Sorry.”  
  
“Quite all right.”

 


End file.
